All posts by John Casey

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Ad Hominem Abusive, General discussion, Politicians, Straw Man, Weak Analogy

What is a war anyway?

Michael Chertoff, Homeland security czar (that’s not what they call him, but they might as well), today writes an op-ed directed against some recent remarks of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor. Brzezinksi has claimed that we’re not involved in a “war” on terrorism; terrorism is a method, not a group or a state or a thing (like drugs). Brzezinski argues that we have failed in the war on terror precisely because we have approached it as an actual (and not a metaphorical) war. Rather than working to prevent terrorism, capture terrorists, and do the other things that will prevent more terrorism (like, and this is just a suggestion, capturing bin Laden), we have incorrectly militarized what is primarily a political issue. Of course war is politics by other means, but Brzezinski’s argument is that we can’t achieve a military victory against a non-military enemy. And, more than that, the enemy in this instance yearns for the authenticity and legitimization that only we can provide (by calling it a military war).

Leave it to Chertoff–the one who lamented the possibility of “clean-skin” (i.e., white) terrorists–to misunderstand Brezezinski’s point. He writes:

>Brzezinski stated the obvious in describing terrorism as a tactic, not an enemy [“Terrorized by ‘War on Terror,’ Outlook, March 25]. But this misses the point. We are at war with a global movement and ideology whose members seek to advance totalitarian aims through terrorism. Brzezinski is deeply mistaken to mock the notion that we are at war and to suggest that we should adopt “more muted reactions” to acts of terrorism.

Right–He doesn’t see the threat. Now bring up Iran:

>The impulse to minimize the threat we face is eerily reminiscent of the way America’s leaders played down the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary fanaticism in the late 1970s. That naive approach ultimately foundered on the kidnapping of our diplomats in Tehran.

We were not and are not at war with Iran. So that wasn’t a war either. Analogies only work if things can be compared. Sure, no serious person doubts that terrorists will do violent and awful things if they get a chance. This doesn’t, however, make it a war. And furthermore, calling what they do a war doesn’t change what they do. It only changes what we do. And what we’ve done so far has been an abysmal failure.

Bush

El presidente

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No explanation necessary:

>_”Politics comes and goes, but your principles don’t. And everybody wants to be loved _ not everybody. … You never heard anybody say, `I want to be despised, I’m running for office.'”

>_”The best thing about my family is my wife. She is a great first lady. I know that sounds not very objective, but that’s how I feel. And she’s also patient. Putting up with me requires a lot of patience.”

>_”There are jobs Americans aren’t doing. … If you’ve got a chicken factory, a chicken-plucking factory, or whatever you call them, you know what I’m talking about.”

>_”There are some similarities, of course” between Iraq and Vietnam. “Death is terrible.”

>_”I’ve been in politics long enough to know that polls just go poof at times.”

>As he has before, Bush told the story about how his first presidential decision was to pick a rug for the Oval Office, a task he quickly cast to his wife. He told her to make sure the rug reflected optimism “because you can’t make decisions unless you’re optimistic that the decisions you make will lead to a better tomorrow.”

>Later, when he talked about his hope for succeeding in Iraq, Bush said, “Remember the rug?”

Here’s the video. I think this man has broken new ground.

Academics, Plain Bad Arguments, Things that are false

Deliver us from evil

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What might the author of this (Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering and Oakland University) be saying:

>Still, the Virginia Tech shootings have already led to calls for all sorts of changes: gun control, more mental health coverage, stricter behavior rules on campuses. Yes, in a perfect world, there would be no guns, no mental illness and no Cho Seung-Huis. But the world is very imperfect. Consider that Britain’s national experiment with gun-free living is proving to be a disaster, with violent and gun crime rates soaring.

Hate to get into a factual dispute, but:

>The Home Office says that despite the temptation to assume that things are always getting worse, crime in England and Wales actually peaked in 1995 and has now fallen by 44% in the last 10 years.

Even if the crime rate were going up, it probably wouldn’t be “soaring.” But even if it were soaring, I think it would compare favorably with ours. And furthermore, and more fundamentally, whether less gun control would change things for the better is a distinct–a very distinct–question.

On this shaky basis the author moves toward the conclusion:

>In other words, most of the broad social “lessons” we are being told we must learn from the Virginia Tech shootings have little to do with what allowed the horrors to occur. This is about evil, and about how our universities are able to deal with it as a literary subject but not as a fact of life. Can administrators and deans really continue to leave professors and other college personnel to deal with deeply disturbed students on their own, with only pencils in their defense?

She might as well say “some say. . .”. That at least would be more honest about the straw man to follow. But, like Richard Cohen, she doesn’t need to wait for any fancy diagnosis or police investigation: it’s about evil. That’s even less helpful and insightful than her original suggestion. I don’t know of the psychological category for evil. My father, when he was alive, used to commit people like Cho to mental institutions as a danger to themselves or others. There was, and as far as I know, there still is no category called “evil” which is grounds for commitment. But while we were talking about all of this, several psychologically disturbed people just bought guns (legally) to deliver themselves and perhaps some of us from evil.

Argument Analysis, Richard Cohen

Evil problems

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The other day Richard Cohen–liberal columnist for the post–declared Monica Goodling, preemptive 5th taker to be innocent, like Scooter Libby (who was found guilty on four counts), of any crime. Did he have special knowledge of her case? Nope. He simply declared, “Monica, you’ve done nothing wrong.” In a similar vein of prejudging events, Cohen moves in to analyze the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech. He writes:

>In my day, Fort Dix, N.J., billed itself as the home of the Ultimate Weapon. That weapon, depicted by a heroic statue at the front gate, was the lowly infantryman armed only with his rifle and appearing to shout something like “Follow me!” This was the Army’s way of countering the glamour of the other services, particularly the Air Force. It took boots on the ground — not planes overhead — to really win a war. It took, in short, the ultimate weapon. No one could kill better.

Maybe. Cohen continues:

>Now from Blacksburg, Va., comes additional evidence that there is nothing as dangerous as a single man and nothing as unpredictable as the mind of man. The man who is said to be responsible for all those killings, 32 in all, will be examined down to microscopic detail. But no matter what anyone says, Cho Seung Hui was just mad. Other terms will be applied to him and, of course, he’s already being called a loner, but the simple fact is that he was mad — maybe not for long, but when it mattered, long enough.

Scoring political points about gun control or the lack thereof before they have counted the dead is bad enough. Turning a real event into a broad moral lesson–one that it doesn’t even teach–is worse. As anyone who has read the accounts of the life of the shooter knows, his actions had been predicted (and feared) by many students and faculty. That’s one of the things that’s so appalling. But let’s not mind the facts–Cohen says–as a matter of fact, let’s proclaim that the facts won’t matter–the facts that is that will come out when we study what happened–for Cohen knows the answer: he was just mad.

Accounts have it that the killer left a long and rambling note explaining his actions. No matter. Let’s not wait to read it, Cohen says, because we already know the answer. Well, if that’s the case, then there is nothing more predictable than the human mind: Cohen knows without inquiry what it’s up to.

Argument Analysis, E.J.Dionne

One at a time

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E.J. Dionne writes:

>Arguing about Imus does absolutely nothing to provide our poorest African American kids with better schools, health insurance, or a chance at college and higher incomes. We rightly heap praise on those noble Rutgers women, but we should ask ourselves whether Imus would have gotten away with comparably sleazy comments targeting less visible and less successful women, or men. I think we know the answer.

We can argue about Imus (and all of his brethren) and the fact that the poorest African American kids need better schools, health insurance and so forth. Indeed we ought to do both. It’s puzzling to think of the implication of Dionne’s argument: we can have only one discussion of race going at a time.

Academics, Contradictions, Plain Bad Arguments, Stanley Fish

Fish on religion and liberalism

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I think Stanley Fish doesn’t understand either liberalism or religion. He writes (behind the Times firewall):

>First of all, I stipulate to the usefulness of teaching the bible as an aid to the study of literature and history. I’m just saying that when you do that you are teaching religion as a pedagogical resource, not as a distinctive discourse the truth or falsehood of which is a matter of salvation for its adherents. One can of course teach that too; one can, that is, get students to understand that at least some believers hold to their faith in a way that is absolute and exclusionary; in their view nonbelievers have not merely made a mistake – as one might be mistaken about the causes of global warming – they have condemned themselves to eternal perdition. (“I am the way.”) What one cannot do – at least under the liberal democratic dispensation – is teach that assertion of an exclusive and absolute truth as anything but someone’s opinion; and in many classes that opinion will be rehearsed with at best a sympathetic condescension (“let’s hope they grow out of it”) and at worst a condemning ridicule (“even in this day and age, there are benighted people”).

In the first place (as we noted in an earlier post), there’s nothing incoherent about studying the body of propositions that compose any particular religious doctrine without embracing their truth. For instance, Fish has made the doctrine and the seriousness with which its adherents believe it without making us affirm it. If what he said about religion were true–you cannot teach it–then he couldn’t talk about why you can’t. Since you can–he has–then what he says is false.

Second, the Rawlsian liberal will point out that there is no absolute truth when it comes to matters of foundational questions of justice and political structure. This is quite a different claim from that which says there is no absolute truth at all. Liberals are not relativists, as Fish seems to think. There is of course plenty of absolute truth possible in matters empirical. These may inform, but do not form the basis of, our conception of justice. So in the end, no controversial system of value can serve as the basis of a political structure.

Bad Explanations, General discussion

Responsibility

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On the subject of science and evolution, Matthew C. Nisbet and Chris Mooney write in the Washington Post:

>Leave aside for a moment the validity of Dawkins’s arguments against religion. The fact remains: The public cannot be expected to differentiate between his advocacy of evolution and his atheism. More than 80 percent of Americans believe in God, after all, and many fear that teaching evolution in our schools could undermine the belief system they consider the foundation of morality. Dawkins not only reinforces and validates such fears — baseless though they may be — but lends them an exclamation point.

For the record, Nisbet and Mooney do not disagree with evolution (and other matters of science fact), they’re simply arguing that scientists need to do a better job of convincing a skeptical public of the truth or the likely truth of their claims. It’s not a surprise that they need to, as even very well educated people hold all sorts of crazy views. Some deny the Holocaust, some insist on the presence of Martians in our governments, others insist that 9/11 was an inside job. The blame here does not lie with scientists. Scientists have their job to do collecting facts, making hypotheses and theories, curing disease and so forth. If the rest of us cannot interpret that, it’s our problem not theirs.

While the authors of the article correctly point out the woeful state of science education as a partial cause of this embarrassing phenomenon, we’d like to suggest that even the best educations and most well-educated people are not free from bone-headedness when it comes to facts. Someone has to be responsible.

But a brief tour of op-ed pages around the country will reveal an impoverished national discourse (just tour our archives). People who deny on no grounds or on superficially skeptical grounds the claims of well established science are given a national forum to disseminate their views. And journalists succumb to some crazy conception of balance when it comes to stories about charged topics such as evolution and global warming–airing both sides as if the truth were a matter of pure opinion. On the one side you have scientists with facts and arguments and tables and charts, on the other, a reverend with a biblical text. What is the public to think when the views of the unqualified global warming skeptic have the same forum as the consensus of qualified climatologists?

The best scientists can do is repeat their facts. They cannot explain their significance. Most of all, however, they cannot explain the significance of having evidence for your beliefs. That’s a job for philosophers.

Ad Hominem Abusive, Argument Analysis, Jonah Goldberg

On the attack. . .

It’s perpetually entertaining to me when writers for argumentative partisan publications fail to understand or appreciate the basic idea of an argument. An argument, as any freshman in philosophy 101 knows, is a series of statement meant to establish some other statement. Rational people make them in order either to convince themselves or others of some proposition. Arguments constitute the very basis of rational discourse between people of differing viewpoints. When those fail, the chanting can begin.

Take these two examples from two National Review Online writers. Cliff May complains:

>I enjoy a good debate as much as the next guy but, increasingly, the next guy doesn’t want to argue — he wants to demonize me. He doesn’t want to win the debate; he wants to shut it down.

>Whether the topic is global warming or Saddam Hussein’s links to terrorists, daring to contradict the “consensus” brings hoots and hollers and worse. My most recent experience with such intolerance of diversity of opinion may be instructive.

He then goes on to point out an instance in which Glenn Greenwald argued with him–I mean, “went on the attack”:

>Glenn Greenwald, at the online magazine Salon, went on the attack — but what he had to say was oddly non-responsive to my question. To establish that the voters’ message in November had been “Get out of Iraq!” would require showing that candidates, particularly in competitive races, had pledged to support what Greenwald calls a “Congressionally compelled withdrawal of troops from Iraq by a date certain.”

And it continues. But it’s obvious that the evidence May gathers for people not wanting to argue makes exactly the opposite point. May didn’t argue anything. He asserted some claim that was challenged by someone else. That’s what an argument is. He’s not attacking you, he’s questioning whether what you say is true. The difference ought to be clear.

The second item comes from Jonah Goldberg, writing for National Review Online as well. He writes:

>I try not to let the lefty piling-on of late bug me. But that doesn’t mean it’s not nice to have someone stick up for me every now and then. So many thanks to Steve Burton over at Right Reason for recognizing that, whatever my faults, there is something like a Goldberg Derangement Syndrome out there (as one reader puts it).

As May points out in his piece, some people (an emailer in his case–nutpicking again) won’t engage. But many do. And it’s wrong to lump all of your critics in the same group. Learn to tell the difference.

Charles Krauthammer, Things that are false

Pacification

“. . . Allobrogum, qui nuper pacificati erant. . . .” (The Allobroges, who had only recently been pacified. . . ” That was Caesar (B.G. I.6). Now Charles Krauthammer, speaking of progress in Iraq:

>The situation in Baghdad is more mixed. Yesterday’s bridge and Green Zone attacks show the insurgents’ ability to bomb sensitive sites. On the other hand, pacification is proceeding. “Nowhere is safe for Westerners to linger,” ABC’s Terry McCarthy reported on April 3. “But over the past week we visited five different neighborhoods where the locals told us life is slowly coming back to normal.” He reported from Jadriyah, Karrada, Zayouna, Zawra Park and the notorious Haifa Street, previously known as “sniper alley.” He found that “children have come out to play again. Shoppers are back in markets,” and he concluded that “nobody knows if this small safe zone will expand or get swallowed up again by violence. For the time being though, people here are happy to enjoy a life that looks almost normal.”

At least Caesar had a flair for Irony, the second casualty of war.